round-up: 11/30
recommendations, quotations, tweets, etc.
Happy Saturday!
Here’s what I have for you today:
Housekeeping
What I’m listening to, watching, and reading
Quotations
Tweets
& a disclaimer, again: Things are mostly terrible right now, and the violence is appalling, and there are many people out there who have addressed and do address it better than I ever could, so I’m not getting on a soapbox here—this will just be your weekly round-up featuring what I’ve been reading and thinking through, like usual.
Things to read:
Housekeeping:
I hate winter. I hate darkness. I will continue referring to this winter survival guide to try to stave off the seasonal depression (I refuse to have situational, clinical, AND seasonal depression all at once).
I also finally got an library card. Please send book recommendations by replying directly to this email.
Also, what are your favorite places in LA? I’ve been hibernating for eleven months because I was in school, but that’s done as of Wednesday. Please give ideas for how I should spend my newfound free time.
What I’m listening to:
I don’t particularly care for Gracie Abrams because ne of my first experiences of her voicewas in that one video where she sings live with Taylor Swift and sounds just absolutely awful. But I love this Ethel Cain song so much, and she sounds good, actually, so I recommend listening.
What I’m watching:
What I’m reading:
On Poetry as Historical Record, the Legacy of Colonialism, and Depicting Disaster in Verse
‘We Tire Very Quickly of Being Told That Everything Is on Fire’
Quotations:
Not everything tattered is ruined.
Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within. I use the word ‘love’ here not merely in the personal sense but as a state of being, or a state of grace—not in the infantile American sense of being made happy but in the tough and universal sense of quest and daring and growth.
-James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
There’s a lot of desires that I think a lot of people have, that they really wish they didn’t have. And desire is so interesting in this book since so much of it is about battling shame. I think you can’t control your desire and that leads to a lot of great things, but it also puts a lot of people in a lot of funky situations they probably wish they didn’t get in. It also leads to a lot of humor, not just sexually, but with desire I have a complicated relationship with food. And I think that’s a desire that really dictates people’s lives. Control and desire are forces constantly at war with one another.
Translation has been enormously influential to my work, and I feel like it’s constantly expanding my own wingspan, my sense of possibility.
I think an attentiveness to the way that place influences and is a part of human perception is something that we haven’t always taken into account.
Translation displaces me from my own mind, from the music in my mind, and allows me to see things I wouldn’t ordinarily have come across.
We’re so often protecting ourselves. But to cultivate an openness is a lifelong artistic project.
At this moment in our culture, where there is so much cliché and so many soundbites, and where our writing is corrected even as we’re making a sentence by a computer that’s using algorithms to move us toward the most conventional possibilities and sentence formation, and where our lexicon is also being diminished by the spaces we have to write in, like how many characters in a tweet, one of the things poetry offers is a more expansive repertoire of language for the expression of the nuances of our feelings and thinking.
I can go for months without writing, though I sort of think I’m writing in my head all the time. And I do a lot of reading. I read a lot, and I take notes on what I read, and I go back over those notes and I find them very generative. And when I’m home and not engaged in a lot of activity, then I have a very regular schedule. And I write in the morning, try not to look at the news. I try not to look at my email. And I work on writing for a few hours. But it gets interrupted a lot by travel, by other engagements, by the need to see other people, and art.
I think that we have to admit how much we’re composed of others and how much that “I” is changing constantly.
this year was kinda weird. sometime in the spring, feeling insane and unwell, i determined i would change everything about myself in the summer. everything about my personality was yielding the same results i’d always experienced. everything was just like everything and i was sick of it. sick of hating myself, my life. all of my brain space was taken up with my own personal injustices, embarrassments, the way i couldn’t get what i wanted. i got mean, stopped making eye contact. nothing felt right. as the year is closing, i feel a little better. i feel closer to having a sense of purpose for the first time, maybe, ever. i’m in my head less than ever.
the idea that western women are exceptionally under siege right now is kind of interesting. my rape was endured when obama was president. i am surely not the only woman who suffered sexual violence while a democrat was in office. i mean, shit. i have two police reports at my place of employment from two different men who jerked off to me at work this year. biden is president!
i was watching catherine liu on doomscroll and she made a really astute observation on aoc going on instagram live and describing the ptsd she experienced on january 6th. aoc said the fear she felt while hiding from the insurrectionists reminded her of her own sexual assault. neither catherine, nor myself are interested in discrediting this and at no point is the validity of this statement called into question (it seems incredibly logical to me that feeling fear would remind you of sexual assault. a therapist would agree). but, catherine points out, an instagram live is a wild place to contend with that feeling. does it build a better brand? absolutely. a trauma industry is forming. does anyone remember the 2020 debate when biden said he would have a woman vp and bernie saunders was cut off by cnn so cnn could be like bernie did you hear what he said??? will you have a woman vp??? and bernie very understandably is like, i’ll have a worthwhile candidate as my vp! which doesn’t generate as many juicy soundbites as “woman vice president.” this idea that to be a western woman is to experience these traumas and that these traumas posit you as eternal authority. that by being a victim of violence you are granted unfettered knowledge that the un-assaulted do not have.
i do not believe this work to be less important. i am never going to say “women of the west! your giant knockers made you seem slightly more fuckable to men at your professional managerial class job! this is fake oppression! look around the globe!” i am, totally, 100% interested, however, in the global perspective. the unifying, and also incredibly differing, circumstances of women around the world. i see these things as layered and entwined together. i can handle my oppression, write about it, learn from it, know some hard truths about how to combat it. learn how to shoot a gun and that violence, as a response, is often the answer. i am not afraid of the bomb. i couldn’t handle being bombed. can any woman? i contemplated suicide during my eating disorder years, played around with it. my various attempts were, really, part of the healing process. i say this because i never stood on the edge of a building ready to drop. i never walked into the water and opened my mouth.
I think I’ve spent my entire life trying to make myself less for people, a watered down version of me, trying to extinguish how intensely I feel everything. I’ve tried being the cool girl and the chill girl and the girl who lets everything slide because I do genuinely admire when people have that ability. I wish I could be relaxed about anything.
-Elle
My job is well-wrought writing. My job is not the production of a book every so many years. There is this sense that we should be in a rush, but for what? For whom?
I don’t think people need to hear from me about anything to want to read my work. Sappho does pretty well in the very long run without anyone asking her anything when we only have fragments of her poems.
Keep writing anyway. Keep making art. Keep creating music. Not as a direct act of political resistance, necessarily. But as a way of prioritizing yourself, your inner life. As a way of accessing realities beyond this society controlled by unimaginative powers. I still think it matters.
One thing that I discovered really early on is that I had to really build a citadel around my work or else it wasn’t going to get done. I’ve had to make structures in order to make that happen. Building structures required a great deal of compromise just from everyone around me.
It takes so long to write a book and it takes so many years of genuinely staring in silence at a wall. To put the language of capitalism onto something that’s actually inherently anti-capitalist is really destructive. I mean, not sitting there producing, producing, producing all the time. If anything, you’re just dreaming into the void and sometimes the dream becomes material, but it doesn’t always become material and that’s all right as well. Valuing art for art’s sake and the art is in the creation. It’s not in the production. That’s the thing that I would like for people to transfer their understanding to. It’s not the finished book that matters, to be perfectly honest. It’s the sitting and dreaming and working through the problems and the struggle and actually engaging and getting better and writing toward this platonic ideal that hovers above your head and shining beams down on you. I mean, this is what we’re working toward, right?
I’m never worried that I’m going to forget anything from a previous draft. It’s not that I don’t forget good things, but I think that often we fetishize what has been done to the detriment of the larger design. I think sometimes we fall in love with a paragraph, even a chapter or a character, and ultimately, those things don’t necessarily add to the book at hand. I actually see it as this beautiful process of almost whittling away. I know it seems counterintuitive, but if I do remember something and it does come into the book in the next draft and I never look at my previous draft, then it probably deserves to be there.
It is just having almost blind faith in the book developing itself as opposed to me imposing my ego on the book and clinging to the things that I think are good. The book itself has a completely different understanding of its own needs, which I know sounds really woo-woo and spiritual, but I think if you respect the work as an equal, you let it speak back to you and you let it tell you what it requires and which direction it wants to go and you don’t force yourself onto it.
Like children, you can’t force people to be what they are, and I think that art is a rarefied manifestation of humanity. It is a person. It’s a part of a person, and you can’t force it to be what you want it to be.
The vast majority of stories being written now are being written out of the self, and I’m sorry, self is so limited. I mean, the third person exists as this magisterial god’s eye for a reason, and you can do a lot more of it, I think, especially in the confines of the short story.
It’s not that I want people to avoid the first person, but to make sure that the first person is doing something unusual and maybe even something that nobody’s ever seen before. Try to push it as far as you possibly can push it. I would say that for any writer of any person for second or third, take massive risks. If it doesn’t work, that’s fine, rewrite it, but don’t be safe. You can choose what you write. If it feels shopworn, find a way to maybe make it less shopworn or don’t write it. Find something else.
I want brilliant writers speaking to me all the time because it makes me feel less existentially lonely.
According to a study presented at the American Heart Association's Scientific Sessions, consuming an unusually heavy meal could quadruple the risk of heart attack within two hours after eating, similar to how extreme physical exertion or anger can trigger cardiac events. The research at Brigham and Women's Hospital studied nearly 2,000 heart attack patients and found that heavy meals can affect the heart through multiple mechanisms: they trigger the release of hormones that increase heart rate and blood pressure, may promote blood clot formation, can impair arterial function through high fat content, and cause insulin spikes that affect coronary artery relaxation. This discovery marked the first time that overeating alone was identified as a potential heart attack trigger, particularly dangerous for those with existing heart disease.
I have never loved casually. There’s something within me, an indescribable force that clings so desperately and tightly to everything, as if afraid that if I let go for a second everything I love will change beyond recognition. I could go back through my life, flip through each year as easily as turning pages, and pinpoint exact moments where I found a new object of attention— a book, a movie, a person— something to infiltrate every waking thought and captivate my entire being.
Tweets:
That’s all for today—
-Despy Boutris
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